socialmedian: Twitter’s Golden Ratio (That No One Likes To Talk About)

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Twitter’s Golden Ratio (That No One Likes To Talk About)

Source: TechCrunch

Aug 26, 2009

Summary

If you’re new to Twitter, life is easy. A notification comes in that someone is following you, and you probably follow them back. After all, you’re going to want some tweets in your stream. After a couple dozen of those, you may start using more discretion, looking over the person’s profile and their most recent tweets. But that gets old quickly as well, and inevitably you turn to using the secret ratio that nearly everyone knows (whether they realize it or not) to determine who is worth following back: “Followers” versus “following”.

If a person has more followers than they are following, they’re probably a good person to at least consider following. If they are following more than they have more followers, the opposite may be true. The greater the discrepancy between the two numbers, the more likely each of those is true — to a certain point, since celebrities like Oprah throw this system out of whack. But for regular, non-Hollywood celebrities, the system works remarkably well as a filter.

One reason why this works so well is that the email notifications you

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